Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf

Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf (1909-1995) was born and educated in Vienna, gaining a PhD in anthropology from the University of Vienna in 1931. A grant from the Rockefeller Foundation enabled him to study at the London School of Economics, under the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. In 1936, he went to the Naga Hills in northeast India for his first fieldwork; over the next four decades, he worked extensively in south & central India, northeast India and Nepal. In 1950 he was appointed Professor of Anthropology at SOAS, where he established the Department of Anthropology. During his career, he published seventeen books, most of them ethnographies of tribal cultures. He was President of the Royal Anthropological Institute (1975-77) and a pioneer in the field of visual anthropology.